Code of Conduct + Kindness

Outline:
This is a proposal for behaviour in online communities. While it was formulated with a specific community in mind, clearly any online community can benefit from some social conventions. First we will outline the three steps to civilize existing communities: Describe, Implement and Control (DIC). Later we will justify why there always needs to be a CANT subsidiary to the  DIC. (CANT is obviously the Controle and Narrative Talent, as explained in the below section "Control")

Describe

As a first step, it is important to explain and describe the necessity of the governance and how it will be implemented. When approaching a new community, you are welcome
to re-use the arguments provided in this document as a starting point. Make sure you don't copy *this* paragraph, as it elaborates some negotiation-tactics which might
be misunderstood by parts of the target community: You should spice it up with some examples of past misbehaviour of members of the targeted
community. If there are no *good* such examples yet, don't bother trying with petty stuff. There is no shame posting some controversial statements anonymously to
provoke the anyway inevitable. After all, better they take your bite and attack you then waiting for them to attack any of the notoriously weak community members, like
for example women. It is also a good idea to limit the initial effort to the targeted platform, not the same users on other platforms. Some community members don't yet see the bigger picture, and since the more technical people are leaning towards mild forms of paranoia they might oppose the idea of consolidating information from different sources.

There are plenty of projects and communities built by technologically brilliant people. While it is admirable what they achieved with mere technical competence, we now accept the responsibility to help them to reach the next level. Everyone knows how socially challenged most of these technicians are (we do not generalize, of course, there are probably a few exceptions to this rule, and we wouldn't ever try to meddle in *their* projects). We just want to help them, to grow beyond the mere technical tasks and sanitize their project by accepting our humble help and leadership. We understand there will be some resistance from some self-declared alpha-males, assuming they own the project just because they initiated it, but lets be clear: Community projects belong to the community. They lost their privileges when they made it a community project and shouldn't start whining when we step in to carry the project the last mile.


Implement

For the implementation phase it is desirable to retain some of the technicians. While nothing they do is any witchcraft, and any of us with half a brain could probably do it as well, it is much more convenient and humanly to leave them their tasks and to keep a chance to improve their reputation. We have enough important tasks anyway. Any minute we focus on soulless technical task is borrowed from time required for our good cause.
To implement the Code of Conduct + Kindness, we need to

   1. Implement a report system. It should be easy for users to anonymously flag offending messages.
   2. Implement a well-balanced rating system. Any comment which doesn't explicitly embrace diversity needs to be down-voted by community members. Other ratings can be allowed as well. The scheme could be something like

    +50 Embracing Diversity
    +2  Tolerant
    +1  Interesting
    +1  Insightful
     0  Funny
     0  Disagree
     0  Plain dumb
    -2  Intolerant
    -50 Intolerant to minorities protected by us

    3. Implement a database to interconnect the user-actions in other places. This can also help get the CoCK there as well.


Control

Having the DIC in place, you now need a CANT to serve the DIC. The CANT can be a convinced supporter of our good cause, but needs to have some techie lending a hand once in a while for the control part. It is important to follow up on user complaints, block the users who didn't honour the code of conduct appropriately. You can help others by building bridges, and advertising your collected user-data (especially the problematic cases) to other communities can help them to avoid conflicts in the early stages. It is paramount to harvest the data and search for cases where someone might have rated a comment Funny, where others clearly noticed that is was actually intolerant towards one or multiple minorities protected from us. This kind of rating might be worse than the comment itself, as it is done in a sneaky, probably assumed to be anonymous way.
It is also good to allow anonymous comments, where the name of the commenter is not displayed along with the comment. Since we need to balance the Rights and Protection of the Minorities against the rights of the single commenter, we should of course allow "Anonymous" comments only for registered users. The username can for urgent cases be stored in the database, but will never be looked at unless the user violated the CoCK.




Now to the actual Code of Conduct + Kindness

Don't talk about properties of any minority unless you are actually a part of that group. There is no way to be sensitive about it without avoiding it entirely. If your opinion is somehow positive it will look patronizing and therefore damage the self-esteem of the group in question, if your opinion is negative it will be devastating as well. And by all means, don't ignore the special attributes of these special people. Remember: They are different then us. Therefore we need to embrace them.

People have challenges, and should never be ridiculed when they become evident. Not everyone is a programmer or good at analytical thinking or basic logic. This is no reason to exclude those people from contributing to your projects. Are you a creationist? Probably not. So, embrace the chaos! Multiple contributors bring multiple changes, and every change can be an improvement. (In case you actually are a creationist, you should even more embrace the contributions of the
logically impaired. Support your peers!)
People which are "socially challenged" or "suffering a lack of empathy" are of course excluded from this rule. There is no reason for anyone not to learn social behaviour. Strange sense of humour and obnoxious behaviour are a choice, and people must decide against it consciously.

If a minority group feels offended, it obviously is a victim of the violent act. It might be a so called micro-aggression, or a blatant insult, but the ground rule is that the sensitivity of the minority always takes priority over the so called freedom of speech of the violator. This is totally in line with the first amendment, as freedom of speech does not imply a freedom to violate. No-one would imply that the freedom to move around implies the freedom to move your fist into someones face, so why would the same level of violation be allowed for speech?

Anyone of us knows how important it is to have these rules in place. We all know how we secretly hate everyone who is different from us, and need to be restraint by rules to hold that hatred in check. There is no peaceful respect for diversity, but we can simulate it by repressing everyone to obey the rules outlined above. And by doing so, we finally beat the system because, while we might not actually enjoy the company of the minorities we protect, we definitely enjoy the feeling of superiority for behaving civilized, and last but not least we get to define the rules. So, if you want to feel superior yourself, just join us, for the greater good!